urdu

Urdu , اردو, trans. Urdū, historically spelled Ordu) is a Central Indo-Aryan language^[2][1] of the Indo-Iranian branch, belonging to the Indo-European family of languages. It is the official language of Pakistan and one of the 23 official languages of India . Its vocabulary developed under Sanksrit, Persian, Arabic and Turkic influence on Khariboli. Urdu was mainly developed in Lucknow, India and began taking shape during the Delhi Sultanate as well as Mughal Empire (1526–1858) in the Indian Subcontinent.^[3]

Scholars independently categorize Urdu as a standardised register of Hindustani^[4][5][6] termed the standard dialect Khariboli.^[6] The grammatical description in this article concerns this standard Urdu. In general, the term "Urdu" can encompass dialects of Hindustani other than the standardised versions.The original language of the Mughals had been Turkish, but after their arrival in South Asia, they came to adopt Persian and later Urdu. The word Urdu is believed to be derived from the Turkish, word 'Ordu', which means army encampment. It was initially called Zaban-e-Ordu or language of the army and later just Urdu. It obtained its name from Urdu Bazar, i.e. encampment (Urdu in Turkish) market, the market near Red Fort in the walled city of Delhi.^[7]

Standard Urdu has approximately the twentieth largest population of native speakers, among all languages. It is one of 23 official languages of India and the national language of Pakistan and is well-spoken in both the countries.

Urdu is often contrasted with Hindi, another standardised form of Hindustani.^[8] The main differences between the two are that Standard Urdu is conventionally written in Nastaliq calligraphy style of the Perso-Arabic script and draws vocabulary more heavily from Persian and Arabic than Hindi,^[9] while Standard Hindi is conventionally written in Devanāgarī and draws vocabulary from Sanskrit comparatively^[10] more heavily.^[5] Some linguists nonetheless consider Urdu and Hindi to be two standardized forms of the same language;^[11][12] however, others classify them separately due to sociolinguistic differences.^[13]